Over the past month of writing I have found myself relying heavily on the “clustering” technique as described by Gabriele Rico in her book Writing the Natural Way. My dad gave me this book about ten years ago as I was working my way through a bout of resistance that had my dissertation progress to a halt.
The book is an incredibly practical long-form meditation on the neuropsychology of creativity, right and left-brainedness, and how to access our creative thoughts. As Rico puts it:
“Too many of us get stuck because we think we should know where to start and which ideas to develop. When we find we don’t, we become anxious and either force things or quit. We forget to wonder, leaving ourselves open to what might come. Wondering means it’s acceptable not to know.” (p. 15)
Clustering, at least in theory, provides a way through that morass.
Rico was an English professor with a PhD from Stanford where she developed her ideas on creative expression. Her method consists first of leaning into the idea that different parts of our brain shape our thinking in different ways. This is the old left-brain, right-brain idea.
The left hemisphere, what she calls the sign mind, “is largely occupied with the rational, logical representation of reality and with parts and logical sequences, [which] has the capacity of ordering thought into communicable syntactic form - the way words are put together to form sentences.”
The right hemisphere is what she calls the design mind, which “constantly thinks in complex images; seek[ing] patterns to make designs of whatever it encounters, including language, which, instead of clear-cut signs, become designs of nonliteral meaning.”
In Rico’s telling, when our thinking (or writing) gets blocked, it’s usually because we’re leading with our analytical sign mind, focusing too much on structure and logic and what we imagine the end result should look like, rather than quieting those thoughts and letting new ideas and connections form and emerge more intuitively. What might this look like, you may be wondering.1
Recently, while thinking through the introduction to a section of my book called “What We Talk about When We Talk about Leadership,” I decided to draw a cluster rather than get stuck in a loop pondering the infinite possibilities. Here’s what it looked like.
Obviously nothing magical here, but it was just enough of a shake to get me started writing a draft.
This same method is also used by creatives’ creative
Because I had been using this method for writing, it naturally came to mind during a coaching conversation. A client has come to a professional crossroads and is unsure which way to turn. A question I find useful in these circumstances is “what are you trying to accomplish?”
This question, of course, is usually met with a question. Something like “what do you mean?” or “at work or in life?,” to which I usually say something like “yes.”
It can be a surprisingly hard question to answer if you really dig into it. I’ve written about this in other forms before:
Part of the challenge with this question, I think, is that we start focusing too much on structure and logic and what we imagine we should want. Our sign mind just jumps in and starts firing off answers (and excuses). What a perfect opportunity then to use clustering to try to find a way in.
What a like about this method is that it feels like a direct line into your associative memory where you can potentially surface and identify seemingly unrelated thoughts and motives that may provide some pattern of meaning when you see them all in the same place.
If you’re thinking about this question, or one like it, give clustering a try. You may find it rattles your brain just enough to see things in a new way.
Give clustering a try (adapted from Rico p. 24-25):
On a blank page, write and circle a word (or question, concept, or phrase) that you’d like to think/write about.
Let your mind make connections, leaps, and intuitions; cluster whatever comes to mind when you write your starting word. Don’t judge or analyze, just let your mind make connections and write them down, circle each new addition and keep going.
Turn away from the part of you that wants to edit as you go; if you’re experiencing an inkling of randomness, that means it’s working.
If the ideas start to slow or plateau, doodle a bit to stay in it, draw arrows to make connections between different ideas you’ve written down.
“You will know when to stop clustering when you feel an urge to write. […] the shift is identified by a certain satisfying feeling that you now have something to write about” or make sense of.
Now set a timer and write for five minutes, trusting that your design mind has revealed some pattern of meaning. Don’t feel like you need to address everything in the cluster, just keep writing until the though is out of your head.